Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday December 06, 2012 @12:10PM
from the fallacies-on-display dept.

curtwoodward writes "Advanced battery maker A123 Systems was supposed to be one of the marquee names of the U.S. cleantech manufacturing scene — it won hundreds of millions in federal grants, had operations around the globe, and supplied the luxury Fisker electric car. In 2009, as the economy sputtered, A123 registered the country's biggest IPO. Today, it's in bankruptcy court, with possible buyers submitting bids for its parts and pieces. How'd A123 fall so far, so fast? As losses mounted, its reliance on just two big customers came back to haunt the company — and a series of screwups at a Michigan plant delivered the final blow."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @06:55PM
from the build-your-own-chips-to-build-your-own-currency dept.

holy_calamity writes "MIT Technology Review looks at the small companies attempting to build dedicated chips for mining Bitcoins. Several are claiming they will start selling hardware based on their chips early in 2013, with the technology expected to force many small time miners to give up. However, as happened in the CPU industry, miners may soon be caught in an expensive arms race that pushes development of faster and faster chips."

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @10:54AM
from the bad-bad-manufacturer dept.

hankwang writes "The European commission fined a number manufacturers for pricing fixing of cathode ray tubes in the period between 1996 and 2005. The total fine was EUR 1.47 billion (USD 1.92 billion), for Philips, LG Electronics, Samsung SDI, and three other firms. According to the European Commission: 'For almost 10 years, the cartelists carried out the most harmful anti-competitive practices including price fixing, market sharing, customer allocation, capacity and output coordination and exchanges of commercial sensitive information. The cartelists also monitored the implementation, including auditing compliance with the capacity restrictions by plant visits in the case of the computer monitor tubes cartel.'"

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @01:21AM
from the shady-business-practices-on-display dept.

angry tapir writes "Hewlett-Packard has filed a complaint against display manufacturers Chunghwa Picture Tubes and Tatung Company of America, seeking to recover damages it claims it suffered as a result of their involvement in a price fixing scheme. In November 2008, Chunghwa pleaded guilty to participating in a conspiracy together with other display manufacturers, including LG Display and Sharp, to set the prices of Thin-Film Transistor-Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) panels to predetermined levels. The company agreed to pay a US$65 million criminal fine at the time. A jury found AU Optronics, another display manufacturer, guilty of participating in the same conspiracy and was fined US$500 million in September by a judge of the U.S District Court for the Northern District of California. In October last year, 10 LCD makers, including Chunghwa Picture Tubes, were fined $176 million in South Korea for allegedly holding secret meetings to keep the prices for flat screen displays artificially high."

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @01:20PM
from the building-rms-a-new-computer dept.

lkcl writes about his effort to go further than others have, and actually have a processor designed for Free Software manufactured: "A new
processor is being put together — one that is
FSF Endorseable,
contains no proprietary hardware engines, yet an 800MHz 8-core version would,
at 38 GFLOPS, be powerful enough on raw
GFLOPS
performance figures to take on the 3ghz AMD Phenom II x4 940, the
3GHz Intel i7
920 and other respectable mid-range 100 Watt CPUs. The difference is: power
consumption in 40nm for an 8-core version would be under 3 watts. The core
design has been proven in 65nm, and is based on a hybrid approach, with its
general-purpose instruction set being designed from the ground up to help
accelerate 3D Graphics and Video Encode and Decode, an 8-core 800mhz
version would be capable of 1080p30 H.264 decode, and have peak 3D rates
of 320 million triangles/sec and a peak fill rate of 1600 million pixels/sec.
The unusual step in the processor world is being taken to solicit input
from the Free Software Community at large before going ahead with putting
the chip together. So have at it: if given carte blanche, what
interfaces and what
features would you like an FSF-Endorseable mass-volume processor to have?
(Please don't say 'DRM' or 'built-in spyware')."
There's some discussion on arm-netbook. This is the guy behind the first EOMA-68 card (currently nearing production). As a heads ups, we'll be interviewing him in a live style similarly to Woz (although intentionally this time) next Tuesday.

Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @12:00PM
from the pilgrims'-progress dept.

MrSeb writes "In its continuing mission to build a 'Wiki Weapon,' Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 and tested it to failure. The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that's quite impressive. And hey, it's a plastic gun. Slashdot first covered 3D-printed guns back in July. The Defense Distributed group sprung up soon after, with the purpose of creating an open-source gun — a Wiki Weapon — that can be downloaded from the internet and printed out. The Defense Distributed manifesto mainly quotes a bunch of historical figures who supported the right to bear arms. DefDist (its nickname) is seeking a gun manufacturing license from the ATF, but so far the feds haven't responded. Unperturbed, DefDist started down the road by renting an advanced 3D printing machine from Stratasys — but when the company found out what its machine was being used for, it was repossessed. DefDist has now obtained a 3D printer from Objet, which seemingly has a more libertarian mindset. The group then downloaded HaveBlue's original AR-15 lower receiver from Thingiverse, printed it out on the Objet printer using ABS-like Digital Material, screwed it into an AR-57 upper receiver, loaded up some FN 5.7x28mm ammo, and headed to the range. The DefDist team will now make various modifications to HaveBlue's design, such as making it more rugged and improving the trigger guard, and then upload the new design to Thingiverse." Sensible ammo choice; 5.7x28mm produces less recoil than the AR-15's conventional 5.56mm. I wonder how many of the upper's components, too, can one day be readily replaced with home-printable parts — for AR-15 style rifles, the upper assembly is where the gun's barrel lives, while the lower assembly (the part printed and tested here) is the legally controlled part of the firearm.

Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @10:42AM
from the why-I-can't-get-into-video-games dept.

MojoKid writes with Hot Hardware's summary of what it takes to run the newest Crysis: "We've been tracking Crysis 3 for a while, from the trailer a few months ago to the recent alpha multiplayer preview. The game is available for preorder and it will launch in February. Crytek has now listed the minimum system requirements for Crysis 3 and they're as follows: Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8, DirectX 11 graphics card with 1GB Video RAM, Dual core CPU, 2GB Memory (3GB on Vista). Those aren't particularly stringent parameters by any means, but as we all know, 'minimum requirements' rarely are. Crytek suggests upgrading to a quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, with examples of CPU/GPU combinations that include Intel Core i5-750/NVIDIA GTX 560 and AMD Phenom II X4 805/AMD Radeon HD5870."

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday December 04, 2012 @05:01AM
from the puts-the-cancer-right-in-your-ear dept.

GabriellaKat writes "Via El Reg: 'Apple is trying to patent wireless charging, claiming its magnetic resonance tech is new and that it can do it better than anyone else. This would be cool if its assertions were true. Apple's application, numbered 20120303980, makes much of its ability to charge a device over the air at a distance of up to a meter, rather than requiring close proximity. The Alliance For Wireless Power, which also touts long-range juicing, will no doubt be comparing Apple's designs to its own blueprints.'"

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 03, 2012 @12:39PM
from the take-a-look dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Here's a photo walk through of how Raspberry Pi boards are made at a Sony factory in South Wales, UK. The factory says that the multiple automated and manual checks have meant that only two of the 150,000 boards made there have been shipped with defects."

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 03, 2012 @08:48AM
from the light-up-your-life dept.

hattig writes "US researchers say they have developed a new type of lighting that could replace fluorescent bulbs. The new light source is called field-induced polymer electroluminescent (Fipel) technology. It is made from three layers of white-emitting polymer that contain a small volume of nanomaterials that glow when electric current is passed through them. The developer is promising cheap, hard-to-break, mercury-free, highly efficient bulbs from 2013."

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Sunday December 02, 2012 @09:58PM
from the cool-gadgets-you'll-never-own dept.

Nate the greatest writes "One of the stranger ereader/smartphone hybrid devices ever to grace the pages of a tech blog is now officially never dead. Polymer Vision, creator of the Readius ereader, has been shut down by its parent company. This company launched in 2004 with the goal of bring an ereader with a foldable 5" E-ink screen to market. They shipped an initial production run of about 100 thousand units before going bankrupt in 2009. Wistron bought the company out of receivership and has been paying to develop the screen tech. PV has made a number of prototypes over the past few years, but they never made it out of the lab. The closest we came to ever seeing one was a render of a smartphone design which could expand to the size of a tablet."

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Sunday December 02, 2012 @06:06PM
from the forged-in-the-fires-of-mount-nand dept.

another random user writes with an interesting use of 800C heating elements to keep flash working longer. It's long been known that heating NAND to temperatures around 250C can restore life, but doing so was practically impossible. From the article: "Engineers at Macronix have a solution that moves flash memory over to a new life. ... They redesigned a flash memory chip to include onboard heaters to anneal small groups of memory cells. Applying a brief jolt of heat to a very restricted area within the chip (800 degrees C) returns the cell to a 'good' state. ... According to project member HangTing Lue, the annealing can be done infrequently and on one sector at a time while the device is inactive but still connected to the power source. It would not drain a cellphone battery, he added."
It's still a long way from commercialization, but if it works on a small scale...

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Sunday December 02, 2012 @03:34PM
from the god-save-the-cd dept.

I recently retired my ancient AthlonMP rig for something a bit more
modern, and in the upgrade got a new DVD±RW drive. Since I have the
new rig and a lot more disk space, the time has come to re-rip my ~450
disc CD collection into FLAC (I trust active storage more than
optical discs that may or may not last another twenty years). The optical
drive I had in my old rig was one recommended by Hydrogen Audio or
somewhere similar for ripping CDs, and can grab an hour long album in
about five minutes. My new drive, unfortunately, takes about fifteen
to do the same. With the number of discs I have to churn through and
the near-instaneous encoding, it's somewhat annoying. After
searching the Internet high and low for advice I came up empty handed,
and so I ask Slashdot: are there any SATA DVD burners that don't suck
at ripping CDs? Read on for more details if you wish.

Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Sunday December 02, 2012 @09:20AM
from the tablet-for-the-gnu-slash-rest-of-us dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Quoting liliputing: 'PengPod plans to start shipping 7 and 10 inch tablets with support for Linux as well as Google Android in January. The company, founded by Neal Peacock, has been raising money to help support software development for the tablets — and Peacock just wrote in to let us know the project has surpassed its initial $49,000 fundraising goal. In other words, the campaign will be fully funded and backers that pledged $120 or more should get their tablets starting in January if all goes according to plan.'"
And, unlike many ARM SoCs, the kernel for the Allwinner A10 powering it is developed openly.

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